Attack On Shevardnadze Upsets Russia's Neighbors

February 11, 1998|By VANORA BENNETT Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — The fragile calm of recent years is shattered, Russia's volatile southern neighbors, which have been recovering from wars that devastated them after the Soviet collapse in 1991, are in uproar again over the latest failed assassination attempt against the region's grand old man, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze.

The reason for Tuesday's disquiet is the fear of political leaders across the former Soviet south that Russia, the region's one big power, may have been behind the attack. They think Russia is trying to bring chaos back to its southern neighbor _ to stop Georgia from taking the share that Moscow wants for itself of the region's new oil finds.

The oil, beginning to flow to the West from the Caspian Sea, is expected to make the poor south as rich as the Persian Gulf by next century.

``Are there traces of oil in the bloodshed in Tbilisi?'' said the headline of the Moscow paper Izvestiya, echoing the conspiracy theories being offered by politicians in Georgia and other southern states.

Shevardnadze was the first to point the finger at Russia.

As soon as he escaped the Monday night attack in Tbilisi, by 10 to 15 men who pounded his six-car motorcade with guns and anti-tank grenades for almost 15 minutes and killed two of his guards, the president rushed to television to make his suspicions public.

After years of stabilization in his once-turbulent republic, the local private armies that might once have been blamed for such violence no longer exist, Shevardnadze said,

Georgia's two most notorious former warlords have been jailed after a 1995 assassination attempt against Shevardnadze. Russia is sheltering another Georgian, Igor Georgadze, a former security service chief who was also implicated in that attack.

``There are practically no groups left in Georgia capable of carrying out this kind of attack,'' Shevardnadze said. Monday's violence must therefore have been organized from abroad, he said.

He recalled Georgia's rivalry with Russia for a lucrative contract exporting Caspian oil.

The first oil is being exported down a Russian pipeline, but major U.S. oil companies do not want to rely too heavily on Russia, because this route runs through the unstable separatist region of Chechnya. They want a second pipeline to be built across Georgia.

But, Shevardnadze said, ``Powerful forces have an interest in another solution to this question'' _ a suggestion Russia was trying to squeeze Georgia out by fair means or foul.

He repeated his reproaches Tuesday on Russian television, saying the attack was not local but organized by ``some third force capable of training professional assassins.''

On Tuesday, Russian officials, including President Boris Yeltsin, deplored the attack and promised to fight international terrorism.

But these remarks were not enough to satisfy furious Georgian deputies who said that the gunmen had escaped to a Russian military base in Georgia and demanded that all Russian bases be sealed off.